Discovering information
Chris Hartgerink
@chartgerink
CC 0
August 8th, 2017
Key points
- Learn about the increased importance of innovation in information discovery
- Learn about barriers to innovation
- Learn about an innovative information discovery tool
- Find handout that mirrors these slides at bit.ly/utrecht-discovery
Importance of discovery
- Discovery is proportional to production of information
- Digital age allows for many ways to discover/consume information
- No longer limited by physical restrictions of paper :-)
Discovery and production

Importance of discovery
- Production exploded!
- Has discovery changed much in last decades?
- digitization of databases
- speed of discovery has changed
- Has mode of discovery changed?
Production changes
- Previously, discovery primarily related to scholarly reports
- Now, more and more data discovery!
- Due to easier options to share
- Due to increased data production
- Due to efficiency in research process
- DataCite is the CrossRef of data
- Aggregates metadata about data sets from ICPSR, DANS, and other trusted repositories
- See also re3data.org for finding trusted repositories to post data to
Data production

Data discovery
- Data can be discovered reactively when reading a paper
- Or by central searches for relevant data
- What is more common?
- How much data that is in papers can be found with central searches?
Combining data and reports

Barriers to improved discovery
- Innovation requires diversity
- Diversity of innovators
- Diversity of content
- Diversity of business models
- Diversity of …?
- As such, for maximum innovation in information discovery, content needs to be available
- For metadata, already possible with CrossRef, DataCite.
- For more in-depth discovery (beyond abstract), copyrighted material limits innovation